


Quieted (free)

by ClaraCivry (Kat_Of_Dresden)



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Broken Bones, Character Study, Five feels, Gen, Hurt Number Five | The Boy, Hurt/Comfort, Number Five | The Boy Whump, Pain, Whumptober 2020, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:34:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27199906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat_Of_Dresden/pseuds/ClaraCivry
Summary: A story of Five's relationship with silence, as he's trapped in a cupboard, and can't make a sound or his dead.Hurt Five but happy ending!
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & The Hargreeves (Umbrella Academy)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 162
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Quieted (free)

He can’t move. He can’t make a sound.

If those guys realise that Five is there, they will put a bullet in his skull before he can even think of blinking.

Not that he would be able anyways, not with a broken arm and steadily blleding wounds on his stomach and neck too. He’s in too much pain, and he is way beyond tired, well beyond exhausted. He’s barely awake.

But he has to stay awake, because if he passes out he will make noise, and he can’t do that. They can’t know he’s there, they can’t know anyone is there, or those assassins will shoot him dead. First in the head, then in the heart, and then a few more times, just in case.

And so, if he doesn’t want to die (which he doesn’t, not now that he’s found his family again, not now that he’s back on a place with food, and books and coffee, not now) he can’t do the smallest sound. He must be in complete and absolute silence, hiding in that secret cupboard on the wall.

And he can do it. He can be silent.

Despite how much he wants to scream out to the world, howl in pain because his body is broken and god, it hurts, he doesn’t. Even though he wants to cry and a tiny instinctive part of him wants to call for help, he doesn’t. He’s able to control himself, body and mind, so that even in agony, he can control himself, and continue existing in the most flawless silence.

Silence and Five have a long history together, as a good part of his life has been spent in silence.

When he was a kid, Five knew too much, could see too much. And Reginald couldn’t very well make him unknow those things (how wrong their lives were, the ways out), but he could make Five keep what he’d found to himself, so at least the others wouldn’t know.

If you’re quiet, I will get you this book, if you’re quiet, you will have more free time, more out time, more fun things to do. It worked for a while - he didn’t tell the others of ways to sneak out, of how they didn’t have to follow some rules. It worked, but only a while.

When Five started talking with Ben and Vanya, when he wasn’t quiet, things got worse. There were no rewards, just punishments and threats. They were enough in the beginning - enough for him not to talk to the press that occasionally called or call them himself, enough not to tell Diego that he had the number of a social worker that had ties with a major network in case there was another beating.

Five was silent, so he wasn’t beaten up himself. He kept quiet, didn’t say what he saw, and how wrong it was. If the others didn’t know how fucked up it was, maybe they’d suffer less. They Were just children, right? They deserved some peace.

But they were also his brothers and sisters, and they deserved the truth. And Five wanted to talk, he wanted to talk so badly... But the next time he did, suddenly Klaus was spending double time in the mausoleum. So Five learned to keep quiet. He hated it, and it hurt, but he kept quiet.

The silence in the apocalypse was downright maddening.

The years and years and years without hearing another voice. He screamed, he cried, he cursed, but nothing. There was nothing. And the silence hurt, because it reminded him, every second of every day of everything that was lost, of everything that was not there. Of everything that he could and probably would never see again, because he’d jumped too much.

All the voice that were now extinguished. Each and every sound, each and every word. It hurt.

The silence became so overwhelming that it threatened to take the last of his sanity, so he created a new voice to take the place of all that silence, unconsciously transferring some of that hurt even to her name. Dolores.

She helped stave the silence, but part of him.... Part of him knew that she was really speaking, part of him knew that his life companion, the one that cared for him in that world that had tried to kill in every way, well... Part of him knew and realised that all her kind, all her affection, appreciation, care, all of that did not really exist. Dolores, for all her kind words, had always been in silence.

The one person in the entire time and space that had kind words for him, and she’d been silent too.

It hurt so much that sometimes it was hardly bearable. But she’d been all that he had.

Until the commission came along, at least. But in the commission he had to be silent, too. His job depended on him being silent. He’d spoken once, with dad, and it had landed him in a lifetime of nightmarish loneliness and near starvation.

So now he had to be smarter. And save his words only for those he could trust. He never spoke a word to the handler or any of the others, not about his plans, not about his thoughts. He was quiet and lethal, so that he would be trusted and would fly under the radar while he finalised his plan. Saving his words for someone that would listen, someone he could trust.

_You’re the only one I can trust._

After so long waited, Five felt even more silenced after telling Vanya. She’d thought him insane, she’d told him to go see a therapist. She quieted him with a few chosen words and looks. His voice was useless, meaningless, because “time travel messes with your mind”. He found himself unheard again, voiceless - now even more so -

Because he was in the body of a kid, and nobody listens to a kid - much less to a teenager. People looked condescendingly at him, mocked him, and all that he learned through a life full of hardships... All of that, it was simply, what’s this kid talking about? He was reduced, in size, in importance, in everything. He found Dolores again, but even if he couldn’t even admit it to himself, it wasn’t the same.

After some quite stressful weeks with his family, they managed to get some peace, and then silence came back, with an anger. By force of habit and according to her, not meaning to at all, Allison rumoured him to shut up. And that hurt, probably more than anything else, because throughout all his life, his siblings had been his anchor, the only people he could talk to, the only people he didn’t have to be silent with. She apologised, they made up, even made an effort to listen to him more, but now... Just as that wound was closing, he found himself trapped again, voiceless, fearing for his life.

Five, locked inside a small cupboard, put his head slowly back against the wall. Hasn’t he been through enough? Enough hurt, enough life or death situations, enough silence. He didn’t choose to strand himself in the apocalypse. He didn’t choose the commission either, they got to him in the moment they thought he was most vulnerable, most pliable.

Why does he have to hurt so much, to be keep quiet so much, why do all of his horrors keep happening to him. He’s not perfect, yeah, but... He’s been trying so hard, his whole life, to fix things, to be better, to... Help.

And all he gets is more pain.

His bones were broken and, without making the smallest sound, tears fell down his cheek as he was trapped in there, quiet. Hurting.

But this time...

This time it didn’t take four and a half decades.

This time it was only forty five minutes until Vanya, Allison and Diego were breaking down doors, rumouring assassins and picking him up, out of that cupboard and into somewhere where he could breathe, and make noises and exist.

He barely did, quite out of it, just making little pained noises in Diego’s chest.

But time.... Time would come.

*

His arm was still plastered, but his other wounds had healed, mostly, when Klaus told him that he was going to “take him to a pleasant evening out”.

The pleasant evening was a concert of some Korean boyband. Five understood nothing.

“If there’s a place where you can scream and let it all out, dearest brother, it’s this.”

Five smiled, getting it now. Klaus had seen, Klaus had known, and Klaus had offered him a place to be loud.

And so Five screamed.

And it was happy screams.

And it was.... A release, of everything that was bad, everything that hurt.

He screamed...

And he smiled, for once.

Happily.

Plastered and patched up, but no longer silenced.

**Author's Note:**

> The incident with Allison rumouring Five happens in my fic "Et tu" :)
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> You know you want to comment!!


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